Rebecca Keating writes “Bad art … is undoubtedly … still art” (Letter, 31 May). Not in its most general and historical sense of an activity that can be done well or badly, where the art lies in doing it well. (There is an art to writing a letter that gets published in the Guardian.) Nor in the sense of Art with a capital A, which, according to the late Sir Ernst Gombrich, has no existence. This usage depends the Platonic idea of art, as described by the third-century philosopher Plotinus, and given currency by JJ Winckelmann in his History of the Art of Antiquity (Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 1764).
Keating’s art abbreviates fine art, a label defined in the mid-18th century by French philosophers, and given its content by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskaft, 1790). There we read that a work of fine art must be original and by a genius. Such art can indeed be bad.
Patrick Doorly
Oxford
